Page 219 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

202 Isabel Hofmeyr

of the bookbinding industry was precipitated by the BFBS-created demand
for Bibles (1991). The BFBS were ever on the lookout for new forms of
technology that could provide sturdily bound Bibles in the numbers required.
By the early nineteenth century, bookbinding was still organized as a small
craft industry. Before the 1820s, books were not bound as a matter of course
and instead, it was common practice to buy unbound sheets and have them
bound to the customer’s specifications (Howsam 1991: 123).
The book as we know it today, namely as a modern commodity, identically
produced in edition bindings, did not fully exist. The organization that
helped to bring this practice into being was the BFBS, which required large
numbers of books whose bindings could withstand the distances they had
to travel. Under the pressure of BFBS production schedules, bookbinding
was forcibly shifted from a pre-modern craft to a modern mass-production
industry.
A consideration of religious texts in the Protestant mission domain, then,
leads us into the heart of modernity itself. One part of this relationship
hinges on the ways in which the production and management of Protestant
texts acted as a force for modernist innovation. David Nord’s work on the
American Bible Society demonstrates how the exigencies of distributing texts
across vast distances brought into being modern management practices such
as detailed record keeping and statistics (2007: 37–66).
A second aspect of Protestant textual production and modernity is less
direct and pertains to the oft-noted way in which modernity, an apparently
austere and secular process, in fact feeds off ideas of magic and enchantment.
By its own account, modernity is meant to be a universal force of rationality,
secularism, and disenchantment. However, as much recent work indicates,
this universal rationality is something of an optical illusion. On the one
hand, this mirage depends on the trick of passing off a particular European
historical experience as universal (Chakrabarty 2000). On the other, modern
institutions and their audiences conspire to imbue modernity with magical
abilities as a way of making these new institutions intelligible (Murdock
1997). The widely studied phenomena of viewers believing that televisual
media are haunted forms part of this process (Sconce 2000). Televisual
media portray people who are not there. Rather than mastering the boring
mechanical details of this phenomenon, popular cultural beliefs gloss this
process in terms of ghosts and spirits.
The mass production and circulation of Bibles captures these processes
of enchantment admirably. This development depended on a combination
of magical evangelical belief and cutting-edge technology through which
identical commodities poured out of bookbinding factories. BFBS publicity
insisted this circulation was divinely inspired and at times sought to suppress its
mechanical aspects, in one case removing the phrase “printed by machinery”